Crit Healing: Poor design choice even if OP.

Critical healing, the paladin mastery, is a poor talent from a game design perspective even if, for whatever reason, it comes out the gate wildly overtuned. It isn't sound because it reduces the amount of choices paladins have with regards to their gearing as a response to stat balance and encounter demands. Healing gear will apparently have Stamina, Intellect and Spirit baseline, and then have two of three green stats: crit rating, haste and mastery.


Three Green Stats Means Three Knobs to Turn

For other healers, mastery is essentially a third unique green stat - as a Holy priest, wherever it says "mastery" I can pretend it says "Radiance" and treat it as a third throughput option to weigh against haste and crit. It is conceivable that I can determine that mastery is more or less useful than one or both of those traditional stats - I could want mastery, but not crit, for example. For Holy priests, and the other healing specs, the three green stats are sufficiently independent in function that I also will desire or reject them independently. As the expansion, encounters and gear level progress, these three stats will probably fluctuate in power. If for whatever reason crit rating is poor in the early tiers or certain fights, I can gear for haste and mastery. If crit then becomes better than mastery, I can gear for crit and haste. I have three knobs to turn to react to the ebb and flow of the balance of the game.


When Two of Your Three Knobs are the Same, You Only Have Two Knobs

But the paladin mastery ability doesn't function like the other healers'. Paladins will have the same stats on their gear, but where it says "mastery" they can't pretend it's a third independent green stat to be evaluated on its own - because it isn't. They'll see haste, crit, and "more crit." Without even looking at how the mastery is balanced, or how much overhealing crits will do, or paladin crit rates, or any other factor, it is apparent that it is poorly designed - since crit rating and "crit healing" aren't sufficiently independent from one another, paladins are unlikely to be able to evaluate them independently. Assuming that crit rating is made at least marginally useful as a throughput stat (as has been indicated), it is unlikely that there will be a point in the expansion where paladins will want critical healing but not crit rating, or crit rating but not critical healing, not because of balance but because the two stats are too closely linked to allow it. The fortunes of the two stats are bound to rise and fall together.


Two Knobs Is Too Few Knobs

For this reason, paladins only have two knobs to turn, instead of the three the other healers are afforded. If at any point in the expansion crit is a poor stat for paladins, they have no third stat to retreat to. They'll take gear with haste on it, but both of the two remaining green stats are variations of crit. They don't have three knobs to turn to react to the math; they only have two. Even now, while current tier spellpower plate is universally loathed, paladins have three choices (usually by taking mail, but that's a different post!) - which is good, because it has allowed them to abandon the horrible stat and cast their lot in with the two palatable ones.


Mixed Metaphors: Knobs as Baskets

Even if crit and critical healing come out of the beta gate overpowered (which is unlikely given how the paladin mastery scales wildly differently than the others), it's still an unfortunate design for the class to have two of their green stats tied together like this. It's best to keep your eggs in as many different baskets as possible, but when the baskets are being handed out in Cataclysm paladins are going to come up one short.